ArcaMax

CÚCUTA, Colombia -- The walkers come in a steady flow, individually and in small groups, through most of the day. The serpentine mountain road they take often has little room at the sides, leaving refugees in the path of traffic. The 350-mile journey to Bogota is part forced march and part pilgrimage -- impelled by hunger and desperation in ...Read more

President Donald Trump cannot want war with Iran.

Such a war, no matter how long, would be fought in and around the Persian Gulf, through which a third of the world's seaborne oil travels. It could trigger a worldwide recession and imperil Trump's reelection.

It would widen the "forever war," which Trump said he would end, to a nation of 80 ...Read more

SAN DIEGO -- As an LGBTQ ally, I am a work in progress. I don't know firsthand what it's like to be rejected or marginalized -- even by family and friends -- because of who I am, so Pride Month is a time for introspection.

My brother and I don't talk much about being Latino, or about being raised in a small farm town, or having an immigrant ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- "It is a great advantage to a president," said the 30th of them, "and a major source of safety to the country, for him to know he is not a great man." Or, Calvin Coolidge would say today, a great woman. While today's incumbent advertises himself as an "extremely stable genius" and those who would replace him promise national ...Read more

The programmers at HBO pride themselves in setting the tone for the rest of television, especially when it comes to the absence of taste, from Bill Maher's "Real Time" talk-show tantrums to Lena Dunham marching around undressed on "Girls."

Every time HBO hits the bottom of the gutter, it finds a way to go deeper still. It is really headed into ...Read more

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, who, like nearly everyone, is running for president, presides over the largest and most media-centric city in America. His national name recognition is respectable, but his support is undetectable. Literally. He's at 0%, lagging behind such Democratic titans as Tim Ryan, Andrew Yang and John Delaney -- all of whom ...Read more

"History is repeating itself, and with a vengeance," John Dean told the judiciary committee, drawing a parallel between Watergate, which brought down Richard Nixon, and "Russiagate" which has bedeviled Donald Trump.

But what strikes this veteran of Nixon's White House is not the similarities but the stark differences.

Watergate began with an ...Read more

Will Joe Biden inevitably win the Democratic nomination for president? A month ago, many psephologists thought so, as national polls within two weeks of his April 25 announcement showed the former vice president with 41 percent of Democratic primary votes.

Four weeks later, that number has fallen to 32 percent, still formidable in a field of 24...Read more

WASHINGTON -- One measure of the seriousness of a Democratic candidate for president is his or her understanding of the importance of religion in our common life. I am not talking here of the perfunctory bow toward personal, sectarian belief, which is neither qualifying nor disqualifying in a prospective president. I refer instead to a candidate...Read more

The more the climate debate changes, the more it stays the same.

Polls show that the public is worried about climate change, but that doesn't mean that it is any more ready to bear any burden or pay any price to combat it.

If President Donald Trump claws his way to victory again in Pennsylvania and the Upper Midwest, his path will likely go ...Read more

There are many addictions besides drugs, sex and power. There is also our increasing addiction to debt. According to Money Magazine, reporting on figures from the New York Fed, "Americans' debt hit a new high of $13 trillion last year, surpassing the previous record set in 2008...Read more

WASHINGTON -- Randolph Bourne (1886-1918) said, "War is the health of the state." James Madison said, "War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement," and the executive almost is the American state, Congress now being more theatrical than actual. Advocates of an ever-larger state, remembering Franklin Roosevelt's first ...Read more

SAN DIEGO -- Did you notice that Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and U.S. President Donald Trump both claimed victory in the recent tariff standoff?

The prospect of an ugly trade war between Mexico and the United States was never a win-win situation. Yet both sides say they won.

It's absurd. This is all political theater, a pair ...Read more

The first Democratic presidential debates are scheduled for NBC and MSNBC on June 26 and 27. The Comcast-owned networks have just announced a team of five moderators for the 20 candidates who are allowed to participate, or one moderator per four contenders. Let's review this tilted team of liberal journalists/activists.

1. Rachel Maddow is a ...Read more

The sadistic treatment of Paul Manafort illustrates something I have believed since I attended graduate school in the 1970s and saw the behavior of left-wing students: Leftism makes people meaner.

There are kind and mean conservatives and kind and mean liberals. Neither liberalism nor conservatism makes people kinder or meaner. But this is not ...Read more

Only the most partisan person would begrudge prayers for the president of the United States, but a recent visit by President Trump to the mega McLean Bible Church in Virginia has rubbed some congregants the wrong way.

The White House ...Read more

I've been shouting from the rooftops for six months that the Federal Reserve is too tight on money and that this lack of dollar liquidity has cut into growth. So it is somewhat vindicating that Fed Chairman Jerome Powell seems to be finally coming around to that idea. The betting markets are now predicting at least one rate cut this year -- and ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- One of the largest obstacles to the defeat of Donald Trump in the 2020 election is the radicalism of the Democratic Party on the issue of abortion. By forcing Joe Biden to abandon his support for the Hyde Amendment -- which currently prevents the funding of abortions through Medicare -- the abortion lobby and activist liberals have...Read more

"My religion defines who I am. And I've been a practicing Catholic my whole life," said Vice President Joe Biden in 2012. "I accept my church's position on abortion as ... doctrine. Life begins at conception. ... I just refuse to impose that on others."

For four decades, Biden backed the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits the use of the tax ...Read more